Writer Scheduling

Veetu Industries used Grammarly to grammar check this post. Because time is money and, rather than worrying about the little things, you could be building the world of tomorrow, today.

Writer scheduling is a lot like staff scheduling except there are more voices shouting for your attention. And those voices are normally the muses in your head, all of them wanting to play at the same time.

Keeping track of those voices and ideas can be a pain. Especially when you're working on a major piece only to find yourself interrupted by a new and amazing idea which demands your attention RIGHT THIS INSTANT. I'm known for flicking between two, three, or even more projects at any one time. Which is why, when a person asks me another book of the Veetu Industries series is coming out, I tend to reply with a shrug.

“When they're willing to play ball,” I reply.

Until then, it's business as usual and my butterfly mind wanders off to whatever is looking pretty and shiny today.

There are two ways I keep track of all the various ideas. One is the usual pile of notebooks. Normally they're divided into two with one idea running front to back and the other running back to front. Crammed into the front of these notebooks are various pieces of paper and sticky notes, all with little snippets of stories written on them.

On the wall of my office is a board known as RAECON (which takes its name from America's Terminal Radar Approach Control, also known as TRACON. Do you see what I did there? Thank you! I'm here all week!). This board lists the current projects I'm working on and the “holding pattern” that they're in. The pattern changes week by week, day by day, depending on what I'm working on. Something which has my attention this week may drop to the bottom of the list the next while a project I haven't worked on for six months may suddenly shoot to the top and find itself on “final approach”. Yet the next day, that project may drop one or two spaces while another takes over. Two days later a new project may insert itself in to the flight path. I'm a fairly visual person and, as an aviation geek it's a great and easy way for me to keep track of everything.

An early version of RAECON

Do you have a way of keeping track of them all? Notebooks, divided folders, or even an app on a computer or phone?

~~~

Talking about writing and all that jazz, Torquere Press have picked up two more of my books! One is the 3^rd in the Veetu Industries series (“The Eve of War”) while the other is something completely different and isn't, shock horror, Steampunk! “A Second Past Midnight” takes a look at the world following an electromagnetic pulse and the affects it's had on otherwise normal people. Really can't wait to show them both to you all!